I'll even make a claim that open specs are good enough for a CPU, irrelevant whether the particular mask patterns are known.
The problem that OpenRISC solves is an absence of free CPU IP. You do not consider an absence of free CPU IP to be a problem but others do consider it a problem and have created OpenRISC to solve that problem.
From the blog post linked in the article:
"the requirement for implementing a mutex is that an mutex operation is never allowed to be interrupted. Previously on OpenRISC this was done by making a syscall that disabled all interrupts as it's first instructions."
Does anyone have any idea why OpenRISC is big-endian?
It's big-endian because little-endian *hasn't* won.
I can't see it ever being anything else. It will never be used in anything useful
"Flextronics International and Jennic Limited manufactured the OpenRISC as part of an ASIC. Samsung use the OpenRISC 1000 in their DTV system-on-chips (SDP83 B-Series, SDP92 C-Series, SDP1001/SDP1002 D-Series, SDP1103/SDP1106 E-Series). Allwinner Technology are reported to use an OpenRISC core in their AR100 power controller, which forms part of the A31 ARM based SoC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRISC#Commercial_implementations
I find the title of this story troubling. I think some people have confused the word "radical" with the word "rational". If this manifesto is what is considered radical then we are in serious trouble.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
